Something odd’s happening in the Christie bridge scandal. As the number of people involved in ordering and then covering up the bridge closure grows, the would-be target of the action seems to shrink. Something doesn’t fit.
This isn’t to diminish Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich. He seems like a mayor who fought like crazy to get the bridge thing figured out and fixed. But the one thing that Chris Christie said Thursday that really rung true was this: all this to muscle a small town mayor who both the mayor himself and Christie appear to agree wasn’t even courted for an endorsement?
Just so we’re clear on this, Fort Lee has a population of 35,732 people.
If so much hadn’t come out over the last 48 hours showing that something nefarious was afoot with the closure and that so many appointees were involved in trying to cover it up, I would almost say that the story might be petering out simply because the supposed motive just doesn’t seem to add up.
There is one theory that makes sense of most of the evidence. Perhaps this really did start as the harebrained idea of just a few people – Wildstein, Baroni, Kelly et al. – and then the bigger players only came in once they realized what was happening and saw the danger it posed to Christie.
Maybe.
At the moment, that’s the most plausible explanation. But it really doesn’t add up. There’s some as yet unseen factor at work here that makes sense of all this. But I don’t think we know yet what it is.
